6 ms·

I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape. Microsoft was the first to release a free brows

• jacquesm 12y ago
  > I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape. Absolutely. I dislike tied sales, I dislike having to buy a Microsoft operating system with my hardware just as much as I dislike getting IE (or chrome or any other browser) forcefully rammed down my throat when I buy an operating system. I'm pretty sure you can guess what browser I'm using to type this comment. > It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included Does it? I see the browser as an application, not as part of the OS. And I feel that as a user of an operating system you should have a choice what browser you run and what browser gets installed on top of the OS after that has finished installing. All these cross-layer links are good for nothing.
  • Someone1234 12y ago
    > Does it? Yes. You say you want choice, but if you didn't have a browser how would you download the browser of your choice? Osmosis? Or, more importantly how would your average user download their browser? Every OS since then (OSS or not) has shipped with a browser and has made it the default for any API rendering that needs to occur (e.g. Ubuntu, Android, OS X, Windows, iOS, Firefox OS, etc). Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years.
    • jacquesm 12y ago
      FTP? Wget? Xmodem? Does it even matter? It's not as if downloading a piece of software without a browser is an impossibility. About 99% of the software on the machine I write this on has been downloaded using something called a package manager and the boot CD that started the process was downloaded as a torrent. No browser required. > Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years. You can't make statements like that. This is the reality we live in, there is no undo/redo/replay so we only have data about this reality. What would or could have happened if things had not gone the way they did is immaterial, for all you know we'd have moved faster rather than slower. We just do not know. What we do know is that Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior, and that they continued this for quite a while after they were already convicted using their lobbying power to get-out-of-jail free. People were downloading files long before browsers were commonplace.
      • cwyers 12y ago
        I think the world is probably a worse place if every computer user was given a command prompt and asked to use wget over FTP to get themselves a web browser. Or worse, if they had to go to Best Buy to buy one on DVD. Like, I can and will make a joke about having to try and put the DVD into the smartphone, but seriously, that sounds worse for pretty much everybody.
        • jacquesm 12y ago
          Ok. So let's standardize on Firefox (or Opera), get rid of all the others by default and let users enable IE/Firefox/Safari and so on if and when they desire to do so. And all three heavyweight gorilla IT companies could support FF/Opera with a clean conscience by donating (just like google does already, points for them).
          • yuhong 12y ago
            Personally I feel this is not worth the effort. Though this reminds me of Apple's attempt to push users to use Safari, which I agree is a bad idea.
    • rakoo 12y ago
      Wrong. Every Window manager has been shipping with a browser, that includes Windows and Apple but also Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, anything with Gnome/KDE/XFCE. But there (still!) are plenty of people who start with an empty distro and gradually build up, and installing a browser happens just like any other package installation: through the package manager.
    • danielweber 12y ago
      I know people who are pissed because Microsoft bundled in their own TCP/IP stack, which killed the companies that were selling TCP/IP stacks for Windows. When I ask them "can you imagine any OS delivered today without that bundled in?" they change the subject.
      • jacquesm 12y ago
        Network support has been an OS feature since before Microsoft even existed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft Yes, there are people that probably would have preferred Peter Tattam's company to be bought by MS. (It was shareware, see thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875). But it definitely wasn't an obligation. Very few would argue that an OS has to have a browser to be functional. Just like very few would argue that all networking should be done in a user space process not part of the operating system.
        • mpyne 12y ago
          An OS doesn't have to have a file browser either, yet no one cried antitrust when Windows 95 bundled Windows Explorer instead of forcing people to buy Norton Commander. This whole argument is kind of silly anyways since it's leaving out intent, which is a very important contextual part of evaluating the action of a person or entity. Seeing emails showing MS trying to deliberately get web developers hooked on a "more standards-compliant" IE and then locking those same devs in is a much different thing than MS honestly wanting people to have a decent default software base to go with Windows, even if both strategies end up in practice with "IE 4 preinstalled".
  • jameshart 12y ago
    Same logic presumably applies to any kind of non-system application, then. Your OS shouldn't come with any particular choice of network client tool - wget (hey! Some of us prefer curl!), ssh, dig. Microsoft's inclusion of notepad.exe in windows is obviously unfair to open source and commercial competitors in the text editing space - and the fact that basically any windows standard text editor control is an instance of the notepad editing UI below the surface is precisely the kind of cross-layer mixing you object to.
    • jacquesm 12y ago
      I think the line starts to blur as soon as your software uses API calls that are only known to you, the OS vendor, when you use your market muscle in the OS field to attempt to dominate or crowd out competitors in established fields and so on. I don't think anybody would read what I wrote as an objection to the presence of notepad.exe with the windows distribution and I note that that presence never stopped anybody from releasing more capable text editors, in fact I believe microsoft ships such a product themselves at a premium.
• dec0dedab0de 12y ago
  The problem with them including IE with windows was that IE wasn't following standards. The idea was to force the server market to tend towards IIS instead of other servers. Netscape cared because they made their real money from server software.
  • bphogan 12y ago
    And this is really important to remember. For a good time in the 2000s I worked on software that only worked in IE because the "tech people" thought that "Windows Integrated Authentication", where you would just automatically be logged into a web app if you used IE + IIS as the server, was more secure. It was a nightmare of coupling, and it's one of the reasons that IE was so hard to get rid of in the enterprise.
• justizin 12y ago
  This is actually the greatest fumble in the history of Antitrust in my opinion. Yes, it's become clear that a web browser should be bundled in the OS, and even as I said at the time, when I was a teenager, you need a shitty web browser to download a good one, or at least it's a big help. What Microsoft did, and is admitted in a book, is to leverage the Windows monopoly to strengthen the Office monopoly, which had impact on every educational institution, law firm, local, state, and national legislature and locked up a ton of public domain work in a file format that only an expensive program that doesn't run on all computers can read. Eventually that was steamrolled over by Congress demanding an open format, though interoperability is still pretty piss poor. Of course, all of the DOJ's resources to show Microsoft who's boss were wasted on a silly fight over whether you can bundle a web browser. If you read Ben Horowitz' "The hard thing about hard things", it's not even the browser that sunk Netscape, it's IIS - their bread and butter was the server. In light of the fact that our phones and televisions now ship with web browsers, and likely most of us are not paying for web servers, it seems clear that Netscape's business model was not going to last. So yeah, fuck Microsoft.
  • blackoil 12y ago
    Curious, considering office was available on mac since epoch, both office and windows got simultaneously the monopoly status, got never bundled with Windows, how is this true?
• JackC 12y ago
  It's not the "what" they did to Netscape (releasing a free browser), it's the illegal "why" they did it (to break the cross-platform web). As the government wrote in a trial brief: "In short, Microsoft feared and sought to impede the development of network effects that cross-platform technology like Netscape Navigator and Java might enjoy and use to challenge Microsoft's monopoly. Another internal Microsoft document indicates that the plan was not simply to blunt Java/browser cross-platform momentum, but to destroy the cross-platform threat entirely, with the 'Strategic Objective' described as to 'Kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market.'" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine#Antitrust_trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine#... This is the strategy an MS exec described as "embrace, extend, extinguish": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish The "embrace" part is particularly gross. IIRC, the court found that Microsoft deliberately misled developers to make them think that apps developed with MS-JVM would work cross-platform, when really it was designed to prevent that. They lied to developers to trick us into wasting our time, to destroy cross-platform technologies that threatened their monopoly. Want to make it practical? There are thousands of us here who have each spent hundreds of hours struggling with IE compatibility when we could have been building cool stuff. We're building the future as fast as we can, but you and I and Bill Gates will all get to see less of that future before we die, because Microsoft set out to break the web and it took a whole lot of time to fix it. Of course that was going on 20 years ago now. Microsoft probably has interns now who were born after IE came out. I realized recently that I'm not mad about this stuff anymore. But it's not a history we should forget or repeat.
  • danielweber 12y ago
    I was just thinking of "embrace, extend, extinguish" when reading through the class-action about Apple routing texts over its own network, so people switching away from Apple would think that Android's texts were broken.
  • nas 12y ago
    > There are thousands of us here who have each spent hundreds of hours struggling with IE compatibility when we could have been building cool stuff. This is the issue that pisses me off more than anything. There must be hundreds of man-years of development effort wasted on stupid things Microsoft did. Not because they didn't know better, that's forgivable, but they did to screw over the competition. It goes back to MS-DOS intentionally trying to screw over DR-DOS and continues up to now with document format standards.
• yarou 12y ago
  I'm actually glad they did what they did to Netscape. Without Netscape dying, we would never have Firefox. I would argue that OSS as it is today would not exist without Netscape dying.
• yuhong 12y ago
  I remember how Opera was affected by this too.
• snowwrestler 12y ago
  Releasing IE for free did not kill Netscape, because Netscape was negotiating with computer OEM manufacturers for them to buy bulk licenses and factory-install Netscape. This is exactly how Windows is sold through OEMs, and like Windows, the effect is that the consumer gets the software "for free" (since it is included in the total price of the computer). So: Netscape and IE would have both come with every new computer. Microsoft told OEMs that, in effect, they could not buy Windows if they intended to install Netscape on it. That is illegal tying, and is what killed Netscape, as it cut off a major potential source of new revenue.